WorldCat

In my previous post, I included a screenshot of a prototype, but glossed over what it actually does. Given an OCLC record number and a ZIP code, it plots the locations of the nearest holdings of that item on a Google Map. Pulled off in Python (as all good mashups should be), along with SIMILE Exhibit, it uses the following modules:

• geopy
• simplejson
• web.py
• and, of course, worldcat.

If you want to try it out, head on over here. The curent of the code will soon be able as part of the examples directory in the distribution for worldcat, which can be found in my Subversion repository.

The moderated discussion hosted and sponsored by Nylink went pretty well. Also, I don't need the records to have fun with the data "” I just need robust APIs. (In fact, as I said today, I'd prefer not to have to deal with the MARC records directly.) Robust APIs would help making prototypes like this one I hacked together in a few hours into a real, usable service.

In preparation for the upcoming WorldCat Hackathon starting this Friday, I've made a few changes to worldcat, my Python module for interacting with OCLC's APIs. Most notably, I've added iterators for SRU and OpenSearch requests, which (like the rest of the module) painfully need documentation. It's available either via download from my site or via PyPI; please submit bug reports to the issue tracker as they arise.

EDIT: I've bumped up the version number another micro number to 0.1.1 as I've just added the improvements mentioned by Xiaoming Liu on the WorldCat DevNet Blog (LCCN query support, support for tab-delimited and CSV responses for xISSNRequests, and support for PHP object responses for all xIDRequests).

EDIT: Thanks to Thomas Dukleth, I was told that code for the Hackathon was to be licensed under the BSD License. Accordingly, I've now dual licensed the module under both GPL and BSD.

I'd like to humbly announce that I've written a pre-pre-alpha Python module for working with the WorldCat Search API and the xID APIs. The code needs a fair amount of work, namely unit tests and documentation. I've released the code under the GPL.

The module, called "worldcat", is available from the Python Package Index. You can also checkout a copy of the code from my Subversion repository.